Published by Lawrence Gipe at the University of Arizona, with funds from a Confluence Center Faculty Innovation Grant.

50 pages, paperback, Edition of 500

In 2014, I received a University of Arizona Confluence Center Grant for “Documenting Operation Streamline,” an on-going drawing project recording the plight of illegal immigrants on their journey through the Arizona court system via the controversial “Operation Streamline” process. With funds from the grant, I published Operation Streamline: An Illustrated Reader (2014-15), which combined sketches from Federal Court with press clippings and original research from UA journalist students (this book was a small edition, and was given away during lectures and events.)

In 2005, the US Department of Homeland Security initiated “Operation Streamline,” as a way to increase “efficiency” with respect to deportation. The program immediately came under fire for being cruel and potentially un-Constitutional; as the site Grassroots Leadership describes it: “Operation Streamline has exposed undocumented border-crossers to unprecedented rates of incarceration; overburdened the federal criminal justice system; and added enormous costs to the American taxpayer while providing a boon to the for-profit private prison industry.”

In 2012, a UA journalism student named Sam McNeil was writing an article about “Operation Streamline” for the activist blog truthout.org. Photography is prohibited in federal court, so he couldn’t supply imagery to accompany his exposé. McNeil asked me to illustrate the topic with drawings made in court, and to appear in a video called “Illustrating Operation Streamline”, which he was producing as his graduate thesis project.

The original sketches are in the University of Arizona’s Special Collections Library as part of “The Documented Border: A Digital Archive,” an interactive Digital Humanities project dedicated to generating and housing verbal, written and visual material about all aspects of the border, with an emphasis on controversial or “hidden” issues that need exposure and re-consideration.

Sketching in Streamline court allowed me to create expressive drawings while addressing a political reality that impressed me as unjust and authoritarian. Although there is word of future legislation to eliminate for-profit, private prisons, there are thousands of deportees enduring long and punitive sentences in these facilities (many are centered 100 miles north of Tucson in Florence, AZ).